Wanderlust: A History of Walking (4 page)

Rousseau portrays walking as both an exercise of simplicity and a means of contemplation. During the time he wrote the
Discourses,
he would walk alone in the Bois de Boulogne after dinner, “thinking over subjects for works to be written and not returning till night.” The
Confessions,
from which these passages come,
were not published until after Rousseau's death (in 1762 his books had been burned in Paris and Geneva, and his life as a wandering exile had begun). Even before the
Confessions
were finished, however, his readers already associated him with peripatetic excursions. When an adoring James Boswell came to visit Rousseau near Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1764, Boswell wrote, “To prepare myself for the great Interview, I walked out alone. I strolled pensive by the side of the River Ruse in a beautifull Wild Valley surrounded by immense Mountains, some covered with frowning rocks, others with glittering snow.” Boswell, who was at twenty-four as self-conscious as Rousseau and more foppish about it, already knew that walking, solitude, and wilderness were Rousseauian and clad his mind in their effects as he might have adorned his body for a more conventional meeting.

Solitude is an ambiguous state throughout Rousseau's writings. In the
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality,
he portrays human beings in their natural state as isolated dwellers in a hospitable forest. But in his more personal work, he often portrays solitude not as an ideal state but as a consolation and refuge for a man who has been betrayed and disappointed. In fact, much of his writing revolves around the question of whether and how one should relate to one's fellow humans. Hypersensitive almost to the point of paranoia and convinced of his own rightness under the most dubious circumstances, Rousseau overreacted to the judgments of others, yet never could or would subdue his unorthodox and often abrasive ideas and acts. It is now popularly proposed that his writing universalizes his experience, and that his picture of man's fall from simplicity and grace into corruption is little more than a portrait of Rousseau's fall from Swiss simplicity and security or merely from childhood naïveté into his uncertain life abroad among aristocrats and intellectuals. Whether this is so or not, his version has been so influential that few are entirely beyond its reach nowadays.

Finally, at the end of his life, he wrote
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
(
Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire
in the original; 1782), a book that is and is not about walking. Each of its chapters is called a walk, and in the Second Walk, he states his premise: “Having therefore decided to describe my habitual state of mind in this, the strangest situation which any mortal will ever know, I could think of no simpler or surer way of carrying out my plan than to keep a faithful record of my solitary walks and the reveries that occupy them.” Each of these short personal essays resembles the sequence of thoughts or preoccupations one might
entertain on a walk, though there is no evidence they are the fruit of specific walks. Several are meditations on a phrase, some are recollections, some are little more than aired grievances. Together the ten essays (the eighth and ninth were still drafts and the tenth was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1778) portray a man who has taken refuge in the thoughts and botanical pursuits of his walks, and who through them seeks and recalls a safer haven.

A solitary walker is in the world, but apart from it, with the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group. Walking seems to have become Rousseau's chosen mode of being because within a walk he is able to live in thought and reverie, to be self-sufficient, and thus to survive the world he feels has betrayed him. It provides him with a literal position from which to speak. As a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative. A century and a half later, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop the style called stream of consciousness. In their novels
Ulysses
and
Mrs. Dalloway,
the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. Rousseau's
Reveries
are one of the first portraits of this relationship between thinking and walking.

Rousseau walks alone, and the plants he gathers and strangers he encounters are the only beings toward whom he expresses tenderness. In the Ninth Walk, he reminisces about earlier walks, which seem to slide out from each other like sections of a telescope to focus on his distant past. He begins with a walk two days before to the Ecole Militaire, then moves to one outside Paris two years before, and then to a garden excursion with his wife four or five years before, and finally recounts an incident that pre-dated even this last recollection by many years, in which he bought all the apples a poor girl was selling and distributed them among hungry urchins loitering nearby. All these recollections were prompted by reading an obituary of an acquaintance that mentioned her love for children and triggered Rousseau's guilt about his own abandoned children (though modern scholars sometimes doubt he had any children to begin with, his
Confessions
say he had five by his common-law wife Thérèse and put all of them in orphanages). These recollections argue against a charge no one but he himself has
leveled, and they do so by declaring his affection for children, as demonstrated in these casual encounters. The essay is a ruminative defense for an imagined trial. The conclusion shifts the subject to the tribulations his fame has brought him and his inability to walk unrecognized and in peace among people. The implication is that even in this most casual of social exchanges he has been thwarted, so that only the terrain of the reverie leaves him freedom to roam. Most of the book was written while he was living in Paris, isolated by his fame and his suspicion.

If the literature of philosophical walking begins with Rousseau, it is because he is one of the first who thought it worthwhile to record in detail the circumstances of his musing. If he was a radical, his most profoundly radical act was to revalue the personal and the private, for which walking, solitude, and wilderness provided favorable conditions. If he inspired revolutions, revolutions in imagination and culture as well as in political organization, they were for him only necessary to overthrow the impediments to such experience. The full force of his intellect and his most compelling arguments had been made in the cause of recovering and perpetuating such states of mind and life as he describes in
Reveries of a Solitary Walker.

In two walks, he recollects the interludes of rural peace he most treasured. In the famous Fifth Walk, he describes the happiness he found on the island of Saint-Pierre on Lake of Bienne, to which he fled after being stoned and driven out of Motiers, near Neuchâtel, where Boswell had visited him. “Wherein lay this great contentment?” he asks rhetorically, and goes on to describe a life in which he owned little and did little, save botanize and boat. It is the Rousseauian peaceable kingdom, privileged enough that no manual labor is required, but without the sophistication and socializing of an aristocratic retreat. The Tenth Walk is a paean to the similar rural happiness he had with his patroness and lover, Louise de Warens, when he was a teenager. It was written when he had finally found a replacement for Saint-Pierre, the estate of Ermenonville. He died at the age of seventy-five, leaving the Tenth Walk unfinished. The marquis de Girardin, Ermenonville's owner, buried Rousseau on an isle of poplars there and established a pilgrimage for the sentimental devotees who came to pay tribute. It included an itinerary that instructed the visitor not only how to walk through the garden toward the tomb but how to feel. Rousseau's private revolt was becoming public culture.

Søren Kierkegaard is the other philosopher who has much to say about walking and thinking. He chose cities—or one city, Copenhagen—as his place to walk and study his human subjects, though he compared his urban tours to rural botanizing: human beings were the specimens he gathered. Born a hundred years later in another Protestant city, he had a life in some ways utterly unlike Rousseau's: the harsh ascetic standards he set for himself could not be less like Rousseau's self-indulgence, and he kept to his birthplace, to his family, and to his religion throughout his life, though he quarreled with them all. In other respects—in his social isolation, his prolific writing of works both literary and philosophical, his chafing self-consciousness—the resemblance is strong. The son of a wealthy and grimly devout merchant, Kierkegaard lived off his inheritance and under his father's thumb for most of his life. In a memory he ascribes to one of his pseudonyms but which is almost certainly his own, he tells of how his father, rather than let him leave the house, would walk back and forth in a room with him, describing the world so vividly that the boy seemed to see all the variety evoked. As the boy grew older, his father let him join in: “What had at first been an epic now became a drama; they conversed in turn. If they were walking along well-known paths they watched one another sharply to make sure that nothing was overlooked; if the way was strange to Johannes, he invented something, whereas the father's almighty imagination was capable of shaping everything, of using every childish whim as an ingredient of the drama. To Johannes it seemed as if the world were coming into existence during the conversation, as if the father were the Lord God and he was his favorite.”

The triangle between Kierkegaard, his father, and his God would consume his life, and sometimes it seems that he made his God in his father's image. With these walks in the room, his father seems to be consciously shaping the strange character Kierkegaard would become. He described himself as already an old man in childhood, as a ghost, as a wanderer, and this pacing back and forth seems to have been instruction in living in a disembodied magical realm of the imagination that had only one real inhabitant, himself. Even the myriad pseudonyms under which he published many of his best-known works seem devices to lose himself while revealing himself and to make a crowd out of his solitude.
Throughout his adult life, Kierkegaard almost never received guests at home, and indeed, throughout his life he almost never had anyone he could call a friend, though he had a vast acquaintance. One of his nieces says that the streets of Copenhagen were his “reception room,” and Kierkegaard's great daily pleasure seems to have been walking the streets of his city. It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them, a way to bask in the faint human warmth of brief encounters, acquaintances' greetings, and overheard conversations. A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting. Walking provided Kierkegaard, like Rousseau, with a wealth of casual contacts with his fellow humans, and it facilitated contemplation.

In 1837, just as his literary work was beginning, Kierkegaard wrote, “Strangely enough, my imagination works best when I am sitting alone in a large assemblage, when the tumult and noise require a substratum of will if the imagination is to hold on to its object; without this environment it bleeds to death in the exhausting embrace of an indefinite idea.” He found the same tumult on the street. More than a decade later, he declared in another journal, “In order to bear mental tension such as mine, I need diversion, the diversion of chance contacts on the streets and alleys, because association with a few exclusive individuals is actually no diversion.” In these and other statements, he proposes that the mind works best when surrounded by distraction, that it focuses in the act of withdrawing from surrounding bustle rather than in being isolated from it. He reveled in the turbulent variety of city life, saying elsewhere, “This very moment there is an organ-grinder down in the street playing and singing—it is wonderful, it is the accidental and insignificant things in life which are significant.”

In his journals, he insists that he composed all his works afoot. “Most of
Either/Or
was written only twice (besides, of course, what I thought through while walking, but that is always the case); nowadays I like to write three times,” says one passage, and there are many like it protesting that although his extensive walks were perceived as signs of idleness they were in fact the foundation of his prolific work. The recollections of others show him during his pedestrian encounters, but there must have been long solitary intervals in which he could compose his thoughts and rehearse the day's writing. Perhaps it was that the city
strolls distracted him so that he could forget himself enough to think more productively, for his private thoughts are often convolutions of self-consciousness and despair. In a journal passage from 1848, he described how on his way home, “overwhelmed with ideas ready to be written down and in a sense so weak that I could scarcely walk,” he would often encounter a poor man, and if he refused to speak with him, the ideas would flee “and I would sink into the most dreadful spiritual tribulation at the idea that God could do to me what I had done to that man. But if I took the time to talk with the poor man, things never went that way.”

Being out in public gave him almost his only social role, and he fretted over how his performance on the stage of Copenhagen would be interpreted. In a way, his appearances on the street were like his appearances on the printed page: endeavors to be in touch, but not too closely and on his own terms. Like Rousseau, he had an exacting relationship with the public. He chose to publish many of his works under pseudonyms and then to complain that he was considered an idler, since none knew he went home from his roaming to write. After he broke off his engagement with Regine Olsen in what was to be the defining tragedy of his life, he continued to see her on the street but nowhere else. Years later, they would both appear repeatedly at the same time on a portside street, and he worried over what this meant. The street, which is the most casual arena for people with full private lives, was the most personal for him.